Donor Spotlight

Often at Radio Eye, we profile both donors and volunteers as a way of building our community. It is a way to share the work of others that makes our work possible and also recognizes the efforts that go far beyond what we do. Readers of our donor profiles may find groups worthy of their support, and we hope that the volunteer profiles are both inspiring and help us recognize each other as we come and go.

Recently, I was asked to profile the Linda Neville Trust. As I began looking around for information about this group. I found a rich legacy of social concern and success in the prevention of blindness in Kentucky that has had an immense impact across the state and beyond. Linda Neville led the effort to cure Trachoma, a form of blindness that is the result of infection. Her efforts were both personal and political. She traveled to Eastern Kentucky, working directly with the Hindman Settlement, and established lines of care that involved bringing doctors to the area and patients back here to Lexington for treatment. She was known to take these people into her home during their treatment here, and worked to establish a network of Trachoma clinics that became county health centers.

Linda Neville’s work was so successful that the Trachoma clinics were able to close as the disease was treated, cured, and prevented. The types of blindness that affected so many in Eastern Kentucky during Linda Neville's life are rare now. This is a true victory.

Linda Neville’s papers are archived, along with other resources that describe her efforts in the Kentuckiana Digital Library (found here at: http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7z08635k63/guide ) and at the University of Kentucky, ( http://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt7z08635k63/guide ). Her life in Lexington is covered briefly in a Lexington History Museum blog: http://lexingtonhistory.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/spotlight-women-in-central-kentucky/ (with photos). The work of Linda Neville is covered in Authorized to Heal: Gender, Class, and the Transformation of Medicine in Appalachia, 1880-1930, Sandra Barney, 2000, and in several books about Women in Kentucky.
Kentucky historian and author, Duane Bolin, writes about Linda Neville in Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times, scheduled to appear in early 2015 as part of the Southern Women series published by the University of Georgia Press http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/series/SWTLT

The Linda Neville Trust is a private non-profit. They have recently supported efforts of The Bluegrass Council of the Blind, VIPS - Visually Impaired Preschool Services who offer support and training to families with childhood vision differences, and longtime support to the Kentucky School for the Blind, among many, many others. The Linda Neville Trust provides major support to Radio Eye. I invite you to read further, because understanding the value and impact of a single individual’s persistent and focused effort was rewarding for me, and reminded me that while for a time blindness was a fact of life for many in Appalachia, a woman brought together the resources, understanding and capacity to change that fact for many and that work has affected generations after her.